Letter to the editor: Considering the very cold and snowy weather there was a very good attendance. The audience clearly appreciated both the performances by the Wisconsin Singers, UW-Madison’s Broadway caliber touring production, and Beaver Dam’s own Good Old A Capella under the direction of Mark Lefeber.
Chris Frakes is the group director of the Southwestern Wisconsin Community Action Program, an anti-poverty agency. Every three years, it does a community needs assessment for the five counties it oversees. In 2017, Frakes had heard so many stories of farmers struggling to get by, she expected them to reach out for help. But few did.
The silence and the growing farm crisis led to the program getting creative about upstream prevention. In 2021, it received nearly $1 million from the Wisconsin Partnership Program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health to target farmers’ mental health over a five-year period.
Each year, hundreds of gallons of soup are served during a UW-Madison Habitat for Humanity fundraiser.
The Madison School District has potential to lead and succeed, Jenkins said, saying the community has the “right ingredients,” from a diverse student population to committed staff and fixtures in the community like UW-Madison. He acknowledged there is an “elitism” in Madison that can sometimes hold progress back, but said with that also comes opportunity.
Noted: A new study led by Matt Hirshberg, a scientist at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, dove into the toll it took on their mental health.
Jermika Jackson believes her son is destined for greatness. From a young age, D’Marion Jackson seemed wise beyond his years. He was a voracious reader who quickly finished handfuls of library books.
He is now a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and that was made possible by the college’s in-state tuition guarantee. D’Marion is one of about 800 freshmen receiving Bucky’s Tuition Promise.
Noted: The term was coined by Lisa Ellinger, the outreach director at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as we debriefed our first Main Street Agenda event in September. During that town hall, our panelists were crowded around a table sitting on stiff, uncomfortable plastic chairs. The set-up wasn’t exactly conducive to our goal of having relaxed conversations where people felt comfortable sitting talking about complex and often deeply held convictions about democracy, inflation or climate change.
Paige Alexis Eide, a UW-Madison neurobiology student, is Miss Wisconsin-bound after claiming her 2023 Miss Madison title Saturday night.
LeClaire was Community Leader in Residence at the University of Wisconsin School of Ecology’s Center for Design and Material Culture from May through December 2022, for which she was paid $4,876.56. Officials there said Indigenous heritage was not required for that residency, but it was a key part of how LeClaire presented herself in her application.
The City Council on Tuesday will consider an ordinance to initiate a “Transit Oriented Development Overlay District” that would generally land within a quarter-mile of BRT routes, except Downtown and the UW-Madison campus. It also includes employment and retail areas between a quarter- and half-mile of routes, mainly around the ends of the initial BRT route between East Towne and West Towne, where there are concentrations of single-use, auto-oriented, retail and office buildings.
Benjamin Jealous, former NAACP president, investigative journalist and educator, will give the keynote speech at UW-Madison’s MLK Symposium event at 5:30 p.m. Jan. 23 at Shannon Hall, Memorial Union, 800 Langdon St.
The group (Farm Well Wisconsin), founded in 2020, is funded through a five-year grant associated with the Wisconsin Partnership Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Through trainings, community members work on building empathetic listening skills, connecting people with resources and discussing issues related to farm culture.
We talk with LaVar J Charleston, the University’s Chief Diversity Officer, about his job and efforts to promote equity and social justice. We also look at scholarship and service programs designed to increase diversity and foster equity.
The newly crowned Miss America, Grace Stanke, said she wants to spend her term promoting nuclear power as a cleaner way to reduce fossil fuel emissions.
“It doesn’t use a lot of land,” said Stanke, a Wausau native and University of Wisconsin-Madison senior studying nuclear engineering. “As our population continues to grow, we can continue to use that land for farming and agricultural purposes, and we can use that clean, zero-carbon energy coming from nuclear energy to power our cities.”
Growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in a predominantly white community, Beth Nguyen began grappling with her identity at an early age.
At 8 months old, she and her family fled Vietnam by ship after the fall of Saigon, eventually immigrating to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Nguyen detailed that journey, her coming of age and her longing to fit in as an American in her award-winning debut memoir “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner,” published in 2007.
Now an English and Asian American studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Nguyen teaches others how to shape their own thoughts and experiences into meaningful stories. “Find that perspective,” she encourages them. “Meld into it. Use it.”
The Odyssey Project will start a new initiative specifically for veterans, named Odyssey Beyond Wars. It joins the project’s umbrella of offerings, which includes the original Odyssey Project, which serves people with financial or other barriers to a college education; Odyssey Junior, for children of students; and Odyssey Beyond Bars, a program offering classes to those incarcerated in Wisconsin.
University of Wisconsin System schools have been asked to consult a central calendar and minimize conflicts with major religious holidays, under a new policy adopted in the wake of a conflict between Rosh Hashanah and the first day of school.
The new University of Wisconsin System policy, approved Nov. 9, 2022, comes after two years of discussion between Jewish groups and university officials.
Noted: The Wisconsin First Nations website continues to be an educational favorite as well. PBS Wisconsin Education created the site in partnership with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education as an important space for educators to access authentic educational videos, lesson plans and learning tools.
This year was another big year for Meet the Lab, a digital collection of middle school learning resources developed in collaboration with research labs on the UW-Madison campus. Two new labs joined the lineup, showcasing the many topics and identities within scientific communities. Visual Communicators: Superpowered by Color explores how to use visual features to make sense of something through the Schloss Visual Reasoning Lab. They research human reactions to messages made with visual elements like color, shape and line. Learn why their research matters in a real-life mapmaking example.
Noted: Kurt Rose is director of human resources operations for Madison Metropolitan School District, one of the largest employers in Dane County. Before taking on that role in June 2022, he was interim human resources director for the University of Wisconsin’s School of Education, where he had worked since 2018 in a variety of roles with increasing levels of responsibility. He is president of Urban League of Greater Madison Young Professionals, which has dramatically increased its membership over the last few years. Kurt also serves on the board of directors of Madison Ballet.
Dr. Linda Vakunta is Deputy Mayor for the City of Madison, where she assists with housing and human services issues. She previously served as Program Director at the Chicago-based Heartland Alliance International (HAI), where she led, developed, and designed training programs for government, community, and non-governmental organizations to combat trafficking in persons. She holds a PhD in Environmental Studies, a Master’s Degree in Rehabilitation Psychology and a Bachelor’s Degree in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: Willie R. Glenn Sr. is the first Black teen librarian at Madison Public Library, where he also previously served as youth services librarian assistant. He began his journey here in Madison as Student Support Service Coordinator for UW-Madison’s PEOPLE program, and later as the Assistant Director at Meadowood Neighborhood center. He has served in several capacities in youth and adult education, including as a lead instructor with UW-Madison’s Odyssey program, Out of School Youth Coordinator for Madison Metropolitan School District and a program coordinator for the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee. One of his proudest moments is helping spawn Madison’s “Parks Alive” from his “It Takes A Village Community Resource Fair” which brings people together over the summer months.
Ashley Morse is Rock County Circuit Court Judge, the first Black woman to servein that position. Morse worked for the Wisconsin State Public Defender’s Office beginning 2010, and was based in Janesville since 2014, representing indigent clients as an assistant state public defender in a variety of criminal and civil proceedings in several counties across the state. Locally, she has served on the Rock County Trauma Task Force, the Rock County Youth Justice Racial Disparities Committee, and has coached the Turner High School Mock Trial Team. She is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and of the University of Wisconsin Law School. She has worked extensively with the National Juvenile Defender Center (now The Gault Center), including her selection as an Ambassador for Racial Justice.
Alnisa Allgood the founder and executive director of Nonprofit Tech, a company that helps nonprofits use technology to work more efficiently, and Collaboration for Good, a Madison-based company focused on building the capacity of for-profit or not-for-profit community service organizations. Collaboration for Good plans the annual Madison Nonprofit Day Conference, the Social Good Summit, and partners with Forward Fest, Madison’s premier tech and entrepreneurship festival. In the early 1990s, she was the founder and inaugural director of the LGBT Campus Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A city-led plan to change a decades-old zoning law in Madison in the name of housing equity is being described by some as well-intended but they’re not convinced it will have the desired effect.
Noted: Angela Fitzgerald Ward is the host of Wisconsin Life on PBS Wisconsin, as well as the limited series Why Race Matters. In addition to her work hosting the television series, Angela is the Associate Dean for the School of Academic Advancement at Madison College. Previously she worked as Director of Family, Youth & Community Engagement for the Madison Metropolitan School District. She is also pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is studying the intersection between education, organizing, and research as it relates to improving outcomes for historically marginalized groups.
Stanke, a student at the University of Wisconsin, impressed the panel of judges with her classical violin skills. She played “Storm” from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” Stanke revealed she was eager to follow in her sister’s musical footsteps.
The east-west route will run along East Washington Avenue through the city’s center and the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus and end at West Towne Mall. The north-south route is in the request for proposals stage and there is no estimated timeline right now on when it will launch.
A new University of Wisconsin-Madison study finds that Indigenous people face high health and financial burdens from Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
Researchers said it costs $880 million to $1.9 billion annually in additional health care-related costs for dementia diagnoses among Indigenous people.
“Taken together, this work exemplifies the potential benefits of offering programs to prevent, accurately diagnose and treat Alzheimer’s and related dementias among Indigenous adults,” said Adrienne Johnson, assistant professor of medicine, UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and lead author of the study, in a press release.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison student from Wausau will be the first nuclear engineer to compete in the Miss America contest Dec. 15. Grace Stanke, who was crowned Miss Wisconsin in June, is using her platform to advocate for nuclear energy while showing women they can succeed in male-dominated industries.
It was a very welcome thing to me that the Journal Sentinel along with the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wisconsin Public Radio brought the Main Street Agenda to “We the People” in Pewaukee.Many people I know (regardless of political affiliation, economic status, or cultural background) are fed up with the incessant blaring ads and speeches blaming whoever the “other” is in order to get us vote for them.The ads say very little of substance about what the core issues are, and even less about how they would go about resolving them, only who to blame − again, so you vote for the candidate running the ad. Nothing useful is gained by them.
The School Board discussed projections from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Population Lab Monday during an Instruction Work Group meeting. The reason for the drop is a mix of declining birth rates and increasing rates of students using open enrollment to attend school elsewhere.
Quoted: “We as a state need to say, ‘This is not okay for our moms, for our babies, and we can do better. And we have to do better,'” said Dr. Nathan Lepp, an associate clinical professor of neonatology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The city’s passenger rail station study will leverage these opportunities to identify a recommended location for a potential future Amtrak station, looking at six potential areas: near the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus, downtown, First Street, the near east side, where the former Oscar Mayer plant used to be located, and lastly, near the airport.
A new collaboration between the city of Madison, UW-Madison departments and the UniverCity Alliance — a network of local government researchers and experts at UW-Madison — aims to change that.
A ribbon-cutting event for a former storage room marked a milestone for Milwaukee Area Technical College.
MATC converted the small space at its Walker’s Square campus into a food pantry that opened Tuesday. It’s the last of MATC’s five campuses to open a food pantry for students, all of which launched within the last year.
The pantries couldn’t have come at a better time.
Soaring food costs have college students feeling the pinch. The need is especially great at Walker’s Square, which is on the near south side in the heart of Milwaukee’s Latino community. Many students at the campus are enrolled in the GED or English as a Second Language programs while working minimum wage jobs that don’t provide enough to cover rent, gas, groceries and other expenses.
Noted: The survey is not a scientific poll, and its results cannot be generalized to the entire population of Wisconsin, but the responses do provide a snapshot of what was on the mind of voters during the survey period from June 28 to Nov. 8. The project is a collaboration of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (and USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin papers), Wisconsin Public Radio and the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The release of the options Downtown, on the UW-Madison campus, and on the East and North sides is the formal kick-off to the city’s Passenger Rail Station Study. The study is expected to recommend a site to the City Council by May, said Philip Gritzmacher, a planner for Madison’s transportation department.
Quoted: Laura Dresser, associate director of COWS, a University of Wisconsin-Madison think-tank, said there’s also been a fundamental change in how employers and employees navigate illness.
“There is this thing that’s changed about what we do when we’re sick, when our kids are sick, what our child cares will accept or tolerate when our kids are sick,” Dresser said. “I think people send their kids or themselves to school or work sick less often than we used to.”
She expects people having more access to sick time hasn’t had a major impact in their decision to take time off.
“The fact that more workers get paid now when they’re sick than used to makes it slightly more likely that they’ll stay home,” Dresser said. “But even in the olden days, they stayed home when their kid was sick, they just didn’t get paid.”
UW-Madison graduate Paige Skenandore found her identity last fall, in a class about the struggles and successes of American Indigenous people.
Noted: My mother moved to Madison from Chicago just over 50 years ago to pursue a college degree and provide a brighter future for my sister and me. The Gee family now consists of three generations of University of Wisconsin-Madison graduates. The university, and a small but thriving community of Black UW alumni, offered opportunities, resources and friendships that allowed us to create lives of unlimited promise, rooted in Black excellence and Black culture.
A hands-on simulation called PurpleState being used for research at UW-Madison’s School of Education aims to give students experience in dissecting political messaging and discourse.
As Madison Area Technical College nursing school graduates pursue bachelor’s degrees, many opt for online and out-of-state schools.
But with new transfer agreements with UW-Madison and Edgewood College, MATC hopes to retain those graduates through advanced degrees.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin–Madison urban planning professor Kurt Paulsen describes the overarching narrative in Dane County as a shortage of housing, which means prices are rising and affordability will continue to be a struggle in Madison.
“On the extreme end, people who have [lower] income spend more than 50% of their income on rent,” said Paulsen. “You see people being doubled up [which] is overcrowding the housing. Young people can’t afford to buy a starter home. You see homelessness and of course it manifests itself in tremendous racial disparities in housing burdens and homeownership.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison limnologist Hilary Dugan was part of the team and emphasized how the water quality must be improved for the health and vitality of the lake. Promoting ecology and restoration of the area would be key.
The UW-Madison School of Education hosted an event this fall meant to help teachers facing these challenges in classrooms.
Suzanne Eckes, a professor of education and law at UW-Madison, said she understands the “sense of urgency around many of these issues” given her own background as a classroom teacher.
“Having been a former public high school teacher, I know the stakes are high and feel that I can speak to this group — I don’t want to say more easily than others — but I understand a lot of the issues, and having been a practicing attorney can kind of break down some of the legalese into what do you need to know? What are the key takeaways from a specific case or a regulation or federal or state law?” Eckes said.
’It was particularly appalling because I’ve never seen anybody dressed in that way before,’ UW student says
Record enrollment, both for the freshman class and overall, at UW-Madison for the past two years has exacerbated Madison’s well-documented housing shortage.
The potential for adults returning to school to reach goals of obtaining degrees and knowledge is often most affected by external factors that can make everyday life and returning to academics a difficult balance. The UW Odyssey Project is a remedy to that problem, and over their 20 years working to bring adults to higher education, they have gone the extra mile every time.
The Odyssey Project started in 2002 and quickly started changing lives. Acting as an avenue for adults to return to higher education through the resources and knowledge that run throughout UW-Madison has allowed the Odyssey Project to serve a plethora of people each year to achieve their academic, career, and personal goals. A celebration at the UW-Memorial Union was only fitting.
UW-Madison is celebrating homecoming and starting off the weekend strong with their beloved parade.
NBC15′s John Stofflet reported live from the parade and talked to the owners of a Bucky Wagon, a reconstructed fire engine.
The Outreach Team, a consulting firm for campaigns, falsely registered University of Wisconsin-Madison students to vote by using Wiscards as proof of residence, according to the City Clerk’s office.
Noted: More than 2,150 people have taken the Main Street Agenda survey. Overall, the future of democracy is the No. 1 concern followed by climate change and abortion. The survey is not a scientific poll, and its results cannot be generalized to the entire population of Wisconsin, but the responses do provide a snapshot of what’s on the minds of voters this fall.
As part of the collaboration of Wisconsin Public Radio, the La Follette School of Public Affairs at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Ideas Lab, we’ve held two events in Milwaukee as well as town halls in Pewaukee and Green Bay. The final event will be Nov. 1 in Wausau.
At 12:01 a.m. — the exact time Aberdeen Apartments opened for leases Oct. 6 — property manager Kelly Whitkins saw 162 applications flood in.
The level of interest was something Whitkins has never seen before in the 18 years she’s worked at the building, which is predominantly leased by students and located near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
Gov. Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Department of Health Services announced a $16 million, statewide investment Wednesday to improve maternal and infant health, especially among people of color.
The funding, largely made possible through the American Rescue Plan Act, will be split between the state health department’s Maternal and Child Health program, the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Healthier Wisconsin Endowment and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health. Each entity will receive $5.5 million.
The MCW endowment fund and UW-Madison will use the funding to also support community grants for programs that focus on the social conditions that contribute to racial disparities in Wisconsin’s maternal and infant mortality rates.
According to Sparer, Madison has long been a hub for housing co-ops due to Wisconsin’s well-defined cooperative laws and interest from UW-Madison students.
Hypatia itself is an example of Madison’s long cooperative history. Hypatia began in 1943 as Groves Womens’ Co-op, founded by UW-Madison students looking for an affordable alternative to sorority housing. Before moving buildings a few times and eventually changing its name, the co-op was originally named after Professor Harold Groves, an advocate for cooperatives and a shareholding member of a more political project: Fellowship Farm.
Bascom Hill will soon be covered in loads of plastic lawn flamingos because of the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association’s (WFAA) 10th annual Fill the Hill event.
Around 30 people are accepted into the Odyssey Project each year and are registered as a special class of part-time UW-Madison students. It includes a six-credit course in the humanities, split over two semesters, for people who are low-income or facing other barriers to education. Approximately 95% of students are people of color.
Taught on Wednesday nights on Madison’s South Side, the program provides child care (dubbed Odyssey Junior), and students are fed a full meal before the start of class.
Because of the pay increase, Madison is now one of the highest-paid districts in the state. It previously lagged behind other districts.
“I think that that’s a really, really great thing that the district has done,” said Jennifer Gaddis with the UW-Madison School of Human Ecology, who has been working with the district to improve its food service program.
Jair Alvarez is a litigation attorney providing corporate and criminal law counsel and representation in Madison, operating his own practice since graduating from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 2014. As a law school student, he volunteered at the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Luz del Carmen Arroyo Calderon is Retention Initiatives and Student Engagement (RISE) Student Success Manager at Madison College. She grew up in a small town in Mexico and was 12 when she moved to Milwaukee with her mom. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010 and taught in the Madison Metropolitan School District as a Bilingual Resource Specialist, Bilingual Resource Teacher and Dual Language Immersion Teacher until 2017, when she joined the staff at Madison College.
Kattia Jimenez is the owner of Mount Horeb Hemp LLC, a USDA certified organic hemp farm. She is a host of the Hemp Can Do It podcast and is a guest lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agricultural & Life Sciences.
Last December, Danielle Hairston Green took the stage in front of a roomful of strangers and told a witty, passionate story about “leaping and soaring” to overcome life’s obstacles. Not only did she receive raucous applause, but she also won that night’s monthly themed StorySLAM at the High Noon Saloon, sponsored by The Moth Madison.
On Oct. 14, Hairston Green will join nine other area storytellers at The Barrymore Theatre to compete in the first in-person Madison Moth GrandSLAM Championship since October 2019.
“It’s important for people to find a home to not only share their thoughts and experiences, but to do so in a space that’s nonjudgmental and where people are vulnerable,” says Hairston Green, who is director for the Human Development and Relationships Institute in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension. “Sometimes at StorySLAMS, you’re in front of people you’ve never met and may never see again, and that’s a freeing experience.”
Within the line of tents, sleeping bags, and blankets, some UW-Madison students say they are waiting for J Michael Real Estate to open at 9 a.m. Hopeful tenants say they started lining up almost 24 hours before then because Friday is the first day applications are accepted and it’s on a first come, first serve basis.
Dr. Amanda Garcia is a paleobiologist and staff scientist on a NASA astrobiology team at the University of Wisconsin called MUSE (Metal Utilization and Selection across Eons).
Whatever college students want Madison Hillel to be, Sophie Shapiro is here to make it happen.
The 22-year-old graduate of University of Minnesota took on the job of student life associate at the Jewish campus organization at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
She looks forward to helping students “cultivate their own Jewish identity outside of what they had with their parents. This is my favorite thing in the world, and it’s exciting that I get to now do this full time.”
